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The "Cheap" Web

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Re: The "Cheap" Web

#181

Post by its-summertime »

eitland wrote: post #72
axblount wrote: post #55

Has there been a serious attempt to define an html/css subset that achieves these kinds of goals? Something that a mere mortal could implement and would cover the vast majority of web designs? I understand the urge to throw out the old and replace it with a new system, but that would be a huge blow to accessiblilty and adoption.

I have been asking for a while if it could be a good idea to make something like asm.js but for webpages: Something to put in a meta tag or something early in the page that lets the browser know this webpage will only use a known-to-be-fast-and-predictable subset of html and css and only use js from a standardized library that provides things like autocomplete and other actually high value interactions.

https://amp.dev/ is that. No one wants to use it because the very first line of the mandatory js file is about advertising metrics.

Re: The "Cheap" Web

#182

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

marttt wrote: post #180
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"... the user should be in charge of this..." As a user, I choose textmode. I use a text-only browser as an HTML reader, works great for EPUB. No graphical fonts, no Javascript, no CSS, no color. Often I will save to .txt so I can read with less(1).

I have done the same, very probably with the same browser you're using (links). Just curious, do you handle images (or graphs) in EPUB files in some specific way? Mostly, ebooks are perfectly fine to use without images, but not 100% of the time.

Skip the images.

Below is a quick and dirty script I use to make a single HTML file from an EPUB file. It outputs a _script_ that when run will output the HTML files in the EPUB as a single file to stdout. It is not perfect, e.g., sometimes the order of the HTML files may need to be adjusted, but I rarely bother. I open the HTML file in links and optionally save as .txt. I don't care for UTF-8 or other non-ASCII characters.

EPUB to single HTML file.

    #!/bin/sh
    test ${#1} -ge 1||exec echo usage: $0 1.epub;
    printf "(\n"
    for x in ${1-*.epub};do
    echo printf  \'\\n\\n,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, "$x" ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,\\n\\n\'
    7z l $x|sed -n "s/.* /7z x -so $x /;/nav.xhtml/d;/[tx]ml$/p"|sort -n
    done
    echo ")|tr -cd '[\\\12\40-\176]'"

Re: The "Cheap" Web

#183

Post by marttt »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #182
marttt wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have done the same, very probably with the same browser you're using (links). Just curious, do you handle images (or graphs) in EPUB files in some specific way? Mostly, ebooks are perfectly fine to use without images, but not 100% of the time.

Skip the images. Below is a quick and dirty script I use to make a single HTML file from an EPUB file. It outputs a _script_ that when run will output the HTML files in the EPUB as a single file to stdout. It is not perfect, e.g., sometimes the order of the HTML files may need to be adjusted, but I rarely bother. I open the HTML file in links and optionally save as .txt. I don't care for UTF-8 or other non-ASCII char…

Yeah, I had a similar script of my own, utilizing the fact that EPUBs are essentially zip files. Thanks for sharing yours. I'm a great fan of your scripts for text-only browsing etc.

Re: The "Cheap" Web

#184

Post by toastal »

systems_glitch wrote: post #94
toastal wrote: post #57

This is why we should be using decentralized XMPP servers to chat since they actually run on potato hardware unlike other chat options.

IRC never died, you know :P

It’s not decentralized so somebody’s server has to take the hit even if the protocol is about as barebones as it gets. You’re also missing some basic features like usernames & rooms having collisions—heck usernames & rooms can’t even contain Unicode which hurts accessibility.

Re: The "Cheap" Web

#185

Post by benrutter »

xigoi wrote: post #145
ryukoposting wrote: post #126

Has anyone proposed CommonMark over HTTP? Like, just shove markdown in a GET response with Content-Type: text/markdown And let the client decide how to render it. It'd be like Gopher, but modern.

Could we go with a format that doesn’t have so much unnecessary complexity?

I've never heard markdown referred to as unnecessarily complex before. Genuinely curious, what features / complexity would you strip out?

Re: The "Cheap" Web

#186

Post by arp242 »

dang wrote: post #167
arp242 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh? I didn't "make up" anything. Quotation marks are commonly used for all sorts of things other than exact literal text someone else said, and having a dialogue like that is one of them. I will continue to use quotations marks in this fashion, together with millions of other people on the planet, whether you like it or not, because it's a common way to use quotation marks and absolutely no one is confused this usage…

It's not listed at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html but there is a convention on HN of asking users not to use quotation marks to make it look like they're quoting someone when they're actually not. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

But I didn't "make it look like I'm quoting someone" because I don't think anyone in good faith would interpret it as such. A quick look at your list shows that it's mostly about bad faith takes, and the problem there is bad faith takes and not quotation marks. This kind of usage of quotation marks is also pretty common on HN by the way, as it is in the rest of the world – just on the first page of my "threads" I see two other people do it, and no one objects because it's fine. If you want to police "quotation marks can only be used for exact literal quotes" then ... good luck.

If you want to rant about people being "misguided" and "narcissistic" then maybe you should maybe also be able to take some criticism from the people that you insult as such, instead of insisting on extremely strict formalities that almost no one else insists on.

Re: The "Cheap" Web

#187

Post by xigoi »

benrutter wrote: post #185
xigoi wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could we go with a format that doesn’t have so much unnecessary complexity?

I've never heard markdown referred to as unnecessarily complex before. Genuinely curious, what features / complexity would you strip out?

I’d prefer everything to have the same syntax, like in HTML (or I should better say XML).

When every feature has different syntax, like in Markdown, it makes parsers much larger and leads to an extreme amount of edge cases that every parser has to handle. For example, when you see an asterisk, you have to decide whether it denotes italics, bold or a bulleted list, which might not be trivial.

Generating correct Markdown from a different is also much harder. In HTML, you just need to escape all your less-than signs, ampersands and quotes. In Markdown, you need to check whether your content is going to trigger various edge cases and deal with them accordingly.

Re: The "Cheap" Web

#188

Post by eitland »

its-summertime wrote: post #181
eitland wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been asking for a while if it could be a good idea to make something like asm.js but for webpages: Something to put in a meta tag or something early in the page that lets the browser know this webpage will only use a known-to-be-fast-and-predictable subset of html and css and only use js from a standardized library that provides things like autocomplete and other actually high value interactions.

https://amp.dev/ is that. No one wants to use it because the very first line of the mandatory js file is about advertising metrics.

There are reasons why I didn't mention amp :-)

amp isn't meant to solve our problem but Googles problems.

Re: The "Cheap" Web

#189

Post by d-lisp »

nottorp wrote: post #153
d-lisp wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't express myself as "the web designer" nor I implied that I wished to share experiences with you. What I meant is that I can share experiences to my friends via the browser, which act as a kind of a simple prototyping platform. I want the power to create experiences for some people I know, in a niche setting, without intentionally inviting anyone else.

Yeah, the problem is everyone and their mother are "creating experiences" instead of giving me the info I'm actually looking for...

Honestly, I don't understand what you're referring to: are you intentionally visiting websites "you hate" ? I mean, there are a lot of good websites out of here that aren't proposing an experience and that allows you to read text properly, no ?

Re: The "Cheap" Web

#190

Post by d-lisp »

marssaxman wrote: post #112
d-lisp wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't express myself as "the web designer" nor I implied that I wished to share experiences with you. What I meant is that I can share experiences to my friends via the browser, which act as a kind of a simple prototyping platform. I want the power to create experiences for some people I know, in a niche setting, without intentionally inviting anyone else.

Oh, well, that sounds fine! Sorry to mistake your meaning. I wish you could have gotten what you wanted in a way which did not have to change the fundamental nature of the web.

Well, most of the websites that proposes an experience are often rather lacking information-wise, no ? Don't you know of any website that reads like simple text ?
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